Gangster Nation

by Tod Goldberg

  “Anyway,” Casey said. “He failed to mention to me that he had this appointment. Then his bitch mother called fifteen minutes ago to make sure he went, and so here we are, here we are, here we are.” He let go of his son’s neck and Sean rubbed at it absently, picked up his hat, but didn’t put it on. “I don’t suppose there’s a discount for missing half a lesson?” He was bullshitting, David recognized, but David wasn’t in a place where he was hearing that.

  “No,” David said. And then David was gone and Sal Cupertine was sitting there for a few seconds, assessing. “There’s a penalty.”

  “A penalty? Like, what, no blintzes on Hanukkah?” Still bullshitting.

  “You’ve wasted my time,” David said. “Every five minutes you’re late, it’s another twenty.” He looked at his watch. It was 4:17. “You’re in for three hundred right now. You keep standing there with that look on your face, it’s gonna be fifty every five minutes.”

  “The look on my face?” Casey asked. “What about the look on your face?”

  “You see something you don’t like?” David said. He steadied his gaze on him. “Something that doesn’t meet your approval?”

  “I didn’t mean . . .” Casey started to say, but he didn’t know what he didn’t mean, so David let him stew on it, because he had him now. “I was just kidding around, Rabbi Cohen. Like we do. The way guys talk.”

  “I don’t like the way you talk,” David said. “It’s disrespectful to me. It’s disrespectful to yourself. Also, you ever bad-mouth his mother in front of me again? You’re going to have a problem.” He paused, let that sink in. He opened up his desk drawer, came out with a roll of masking tape and a pair of long silver scissors. “And that ink is disrespectful to us all.” He pulled out a foot of tape, cut it with the scissors, put it flat on the desk, sticky side up. “My family didn’t get tattooed in the camps so you could come here and put barbed wire on your skin, you understand?” That was a new wrinkle, David adding some Holocaust history to his family on the spot. Fuck it. Now that he was gonna be Mossad, why not? Plus, there were survivors who attended Temple Beth Israel and they didn’t need to see that shit. “So you’re gonna put this tape around your arm and you’re gonna leave it there until you’re back home. You ever show up here again with that tattoo showing, I won’t bother with the tape. I’ll just use the scissors.”

  “I don’t come to temple to be threatened,” Casey said.

  “You don’t come to temple,” David said, which got OG Sean B to mutter “Damn, G.” David looked at his watch again. “You’re now at three fifty. You want to go to four?”

  “I want to talk to your boss,” Casey said, because he was one of those guys who always wanted to talk to the boss, the ploy of business travelers everywhere. “I donate a lot of money to this temple. This is bullshit.”

  “You don’t donate that much,” David said. “Your wife does, though.”

  David came around his desk. He wasn’t as big as Casey, in fact David never really was one of those weightlifter types, but it was about presence, and David had the gravity of man who wouldn’t mind killing you, because he wouldn’t, and so he wasn’t surprised when Casey took an instinctual step backward. He picked up the tape, grabbed Casey’s arm, wrapped the sticky side onto his skin, tourniquet-tight.

  “Go outside,” David said. “Stare up into the sky and make your complaint. My boss will get back to you upon his return.” David put his arm around OG Sean B’s shoulder, the kid sweaty. “When you’re done,” he continued, “you can leave a check on my desk, or Esther will be here tomorrow morning and she can run your credit card. I’ll be in the small shul with your son, getting him ready for manhood.” He tapped his watch. “Let’s call it three seventy-five.”

  Maybe Rabbi Kales was right. Maybe he wouldn’t always be able to scare people into doing what he wanted. Maybe he didn’t want that, anyway. But the point was, today, while he still could, Rabbi David Cohen was going to get his, so he could get out. There was no postwar? Fine. Then he’d just fight the entire time.

  When he got back to his desk an hour later, there was a stack of twenties on his desk, a yellow Post-it note stuck to the top bill, Casey’s block-letter scrawl filling it up, margin to margin:

  SORRY FOR ALL THE MISUNDERSTANDING. PS: NEIL DIAMOND IS PLAYING THE MGM ON NEW YEAR’S EVE. YOU’RE INVITED TO SIT IN OUR BOX.

  David wondered what kind of Jew got a barbed wire tattoo and then he figured it was the same kind of Jew who thought David wanted to ring in the New Year with Neil fucking Diamond.

  Thing was, New Year’s Eve, a lot of people got drunk and got into tragic accidents. David made a note of that.

  “Why does this office look smaller with you in it?”

  David looked up and saw Rachel Savone—Bennie’s wife and Rabbi Kales’s daughter—standing in the doorway. She was dressed in a sky-blue Ralph Lauren Polo dress, her arms and legs perfectly tanned. Her sunglasses were up in her hair, which looked lighter, and she had a purse dangling between her elbow and wrist.

  “I changed the furniture,” David said.

  “That’s not it,” Rachel said. She stepped inside, closed the door behind her, then sat down in the chair across from David. “My husband says you have photos for me?”

  “Yes, right.” He opened a drawer in his desk and came out with sheets of proofs from the Rosen/Solomon wedding.

  “I finally get to see the wedding my husband paid for,” she said. She took a tube of pink lipstick from her purse and began silently marking any potentially incriminating photos of guests or property. After she was gone, David would go through and X out any pictures that showed his face. “Do you think they’ll lie and say the baby was premature?” she asked after a while, not looking up.

  “I doubt it,” David said.

  “What a shanda it would have been if I was pregnant on my wedding day,” Rachel said.

  “Times have changed,” David said.

  “No,” Rachel said. “People have changed. No one wants to offend anyone anymore by saying anything directly to them. My mother would have sent me to live on a kibbutz before she’d have me pregnant under a chuppah.” She paused, brought a proof page close to her face, then finally made eye contact with David. “Do you have a magnifying glass?” David did. Rachel hovered it over several photos. “Who let this asshole bring his mistress to the wedding?”

  “The weathergirl?”

  “Yes, the weathergirl,” Rachel practically spit. “Did you say something to Jordan?”

  “No.”

  “No? You see? This is exactly what I’m talking about.” She flipped back through the pages, crossing off photos. “And in a red dress. Disgusting.” When she was finished, she gathered up all the proof pages and slid them across David’s desk. “Looks like it was a great party.”

  “The bride and groom seemed happy.”

  “Well, that’s nice.” Rachel sat there for a moment in silence, as if she was mulling over some offer. She didn’t know the absolute truth about David—didn’t know his real name, didn’t know his backstory, and, crucially, didn’t know what she didn’t know—but she knew enough that whenever David saw her, he spent most of the time calculating in his mind how, precisely, he might kill her to get out of whatever trap she was about to set for him. Problem was David sensed that she knew that, too. “I figured it out,” Rachel said eventually. “The thing that’s missing in this office is God.”

  “He’s here,” David said.

  “Oh, I know,” she said. “You’ve read all the same books, believe all the same eschatology. But in this room, Rabbi Cohen, you lack the presence of my father. And so you lack the authority of God.” She dropped her lipstick back into her purse, then came out with a photocopy of a newspaper article, set it on top of the photo proofs. “My husband wanted me to bring this to you,” she said, “which means I’ve probably just committed a felony.”


  It was a story from the Chicago Sun-Times about a film festival. David wasn’t sure what the fuck it was all about until he scanned to the bottom and read the news about cousin Ronnie—who in the paper was identified as “Philanthropist Ronald J. Cupertine,” as if no one knew he was a murderer, but then Ronnie did always tend to buy full-page ads for his car lots in the Sun-Times—being hospitalized with some neurological problem. If the newspaper was reporting he was in the hospital, that meant it was serious. Back in the day, Ronnie would never let anyone say he was sick, unless it was looking like there might be some legal trouble about to come down, in which case he’d develop an arrhythmia, get himself checked into his own wing at Northwestern, where he could make phone calls that he knew couldn’t be tapped, hospitals one place where the feds couldn’t just put ears on somebody, because of all the privacy and confidentiality laws.

  This didn’t look like that.

  He read further, saw that Ronnie was now underwriting a Native Short Film Festival, in partnership with the Chuyalla tribe.

  So.

  Not Russians.

  Shit.

  “Tell him I said thanks,” David said. “These look like interesting films.”

  “It’s as if you don’t think I have a brain,” Rachel said. She stood up then, walked over to the window, looked outside. “Can I tell you something in confidence, Rabbi Cohen?”

  “Of course.”

  “No,” she said. “Actual confidence. Not the thing where I tell you something and then I get a call from Vincent Zangari telling me he’s had my passport canceled, or how I find out that my father’s will has been changed and that Temple Beth Israel now owns the family business, which, I might add, my mother paid for originally. Because I’m a little light on friends right now, Rabbi, and could use a learned person’s point of view on something.”

  “I’m happy to be that person,” David said.

  Rachel nodded, considered that. “I don’t know what you told my father to convince him to move into an assisted-living facility,” she said. “But it’s been appreciated. I think he’s getting good care there. Making friends. Eating right for the first time in his life. I think, mentally, he’s in a pretty good place, but he’s having more and more . . . spells, I guess you’d say. He’s not progressed into full-blown dementia as yet, obviously. So, I keep thinking, when his disease does progress, and his mind really starts to go, what do I do?”

  “You love him,” David said.

  “No,” Rachel said, “that not what I mean.” She tapped the window. “When my father designed this building, do you know why he wanted a window here?”

  “No.”

  “He said it was so he’d always have a view of the setting sun,” she said.

  David walked over and stood beside Rachel, looked out. All he saw now was the school. “Talmud says nothing will ever satisfy the eye until it’s covered by the dust of the grave.”

  Rachel forced out a sigh. She turned and looked at David. “What I mean,” she continued, “is when he starts talking. When he doesn’t know who he’s talking to. When he says things that are true to people who shouldn’t know the truth.” She tapped on the window again. “When he starts talking about where the bodies are buried, Rabbi.”

  David reached past Rachel and drew the blinds down. “You bring him home,” David said. “You care for him yourself. And then if he needs to go, you help with that, too.”

  “How?”

  “If it comes to it,” David said, “I’ll show you.”

  Rabbi David Cohen, who used to be a hit man named Sal Cupertine, watched those words sink into Rachel Savone. He’d lived in Las Vegas for three years now, and in that time he’d thought of his wife and son every single day. He tried to imagine what Jennifer’s life must be like, the loneliness she must feel, the fear that surely accompanied that loneliness. But he never could quite picture it, until today, until right now, when he saw a flicker of his own wife in this woman.

  Rachel blinked once. “It’s late. I should probably let you go.”

  “Come anytime you need to talk, Rachel.”

  “I’ll be sure to do that.” She smiled wanly, then took her sunglasses from her hair, slid them onto her face, tucked the long strands of her hair back behind her ears. Rachel and Jennifer were the only two people in the world who might understand what it was like to be in each other’s skin. Sad thing was, if both were lucky, they’d never lay eyes on each other. “Thank you for listening, Rabbi.”

  After Rachel left his office, David picked up the photo proofs from his desk. She’d gone through and cut nearly twenty photos, including every single one in which he appeared.

  7

  Why aren’t we going to school?” William asked.

  Jennifer and William walked up Michigan Avenue, where she had the cab drop them off, checked if anyone was following them, then swung west two blocks, to State Street, went inside Carson’s department store, in the old Sullivan Building, took the escalator to the second floor, women’s cosmetics. It was funny. A hundred years Carson’s had been on that corner and she’d never once bought anything there. Her mother used to take her to the store during the holidays, when the entire building was done up in gold and red, the building’s brass fixtures all shined to a glow, the display windows on the street filled with scenes of small-town Christmas. They’d try on expensive clothes, do a little fashion show for each other, twirling in front of the three-way mirror, then her mother would take her to the Parker House for tea, which seemed extravagant for just hot water and a bag of herbs.

  By the time Jennifer had a little bit of money, could maybe afford to shop at Carson’s, back when Sal was starting to do well, that’s when they bought a house and had a kid, acted sensibly, put everything back into the family, Sal telling her that one day they’d retire out west and she could shop on Rodeo Drive, like she was in Pretty Woman. It was an idea Jennifer appreciated, even if it was the opposite of what she’d grown to want out of life.

  Carson’s was a little dingy now—still classy, sure, the Sullivan Building was architecturally stunning, no matter how many mirrors and mannequins you shoved inside it—but the floors were stained in places. She spotted water damage in the acoustic tiles above her, which, when paired with the security cameras over every register, gave the impression that she was in a detention facility.

  She’d never once brought William here—she couldn’t imagine a reason why she ever would have—but now that they were inside, she felt sorry for that. She could have told William about her mother, about how they didn’t have very much money but still liked to do little special things that seemed expensive, and how that had made Jennifer feel like she had an exciting secret life.

  She didn’t feel that way anymore.

  “Mommy,” William said, “shouldn’t we be at school?” This was a question William had asked every day for the last week, since Jennifer decided she needed to keep him with her, every moment of every day, until today, the first Thursday of September.

  “We’re on a field trip,” Jennifer said.

  “Why aren’t we with the rest of the school?”

  “It’s a special field trip,” Jennifer said. “It’s one big game of tag.”

  “I don’t like to be ‘it.’”

  “Then we’ll play hide-and-go-seek instead. I know you like that one.”

  “Will you let me hide this time?”

  “Yes,” she said. At home, that wasn’t possible. There were too many things he might stumble into. “Just this one time.”

  Jennifer headed over to the M.A.C. counter, where lanky blond women in tight black tops and gay men with asymmetrical haircuts in equally tight black shirts applied makeup to women who’d never be able to replicate the look at home. Jennifer slid around the counter to a display of lip liners, pulled out a sample of Spice, ran the color on her hand. It was off-brown, muted,
not terribly exciting.

  “That would look great on you.” It was one of the blondes. She was doing up a woman in her thirties talking on her cell phone. The blonde was taller than Jennifer, or at least her platform heels made her that way, and her lips were painted a blood red, her eyes done up smoky, which, when combined with the fact that Jennifer could see the nobs of her hip bones from her exposed midriff, made her look like she was heading into either rehab or the ground.

  “You think so?”

  “Yeah, totally,” she said. “Try it on your lips. It looks way better on your face than on your hand.”

  “I don’t know,” Jennifer said, “I sort of have an aversion to germs.”

  The blonde grasped at her collar, like she was looking for pearls. “Ohmygod, I feel the same way. You don’t know where they’ve been.” She held up a finger. “I could open a new one and if you like it, you buy that one, and if you hate it, we’ll just pretend it came damaged.”

  “That would be great,” Jennifer said.

  The blonde reached under the counter, pulled out a box, opened it up, handed the liner to Jennifer, left the box right there. “Try it.”

  The woman on the phone hung up, threw her phone into her purse. “Heather? We gonna finish or what?”

  The blonde—Heather—gave Jennifer a conspiratorial eye-roll, like they were in this together. “Give me one sec.” She reached under the counter and came out with a small rubber ball. “Can I give this to your son? It’s a superball. One of those that bounces to the ceiling? Is that okay?”

  “Of course,” Jennifer said.

  “Here you go,” Heather said, and William took the ball from her hand. It was colored to look like the Earth and William was at that stage where he was fascinated by maps, so his attention was immediately grasped. He didn’t even bother to bounce the ball. Instead, he started pointing to places on the globe and naming the countries at random. Papua New Guinea. Yemen. Haiti. Vietnam. Switzerland. Has strong metaphorical thinking and amazing memorization skills, his school report had said, but must control his irritation at the pace of learning. That was both William’s curse and his gift: He was never bored, only frustrated, which Jennifer recognized was her fault. She’d closed the world around him so tightly that when he wasn’t in school, he was only with her or with his books. Not even the kids in the neighborhood wanted to play with him now, or maybe their parents wouldn’t allow it. Which made sense. Still, that was no way for a boy to grow up. She knew that.